In the last two decades, after all Soviet ideological restrictions on scientific and cultural ties with Turkey fell, and Turkey itself was put in order in its archival affairs, Russian historians had the opportunity to work in Turkish archives. Scientists who study the national histories of the Turkic peoples of the former Soviet Union are particularly active in conducting archival research in Turkey. Indeed, for them, as well as for the study of the Middle Ages in Eastern Europe in general, the Ottoman documents stored in Turkish archives are of great interest. However, mastering them is quite difficult, since the Turkish language, which is related and close to other Turkic languages, requires special language training to work with documents in it, and special difficulties arise when getting acquainted with its Ottoman version. In 1928, Turkey abandoned the use of the Arabic alphabet for its language and switched to the Latin alphabet. The Arabic script was obviously inconvenient for the Turkic languages: it does not imply the obligatory representation of vowel sounds on the letter, which is explained by a peculiar pattern of their use in Arabic. The Turkic peoples, even in foreign words, usually try to separate consonants with vowels. Turkic texts written in Arabic script sometimes turned into some kind of puzzles that the reader had to be able to solve. Therefore, learning to read and write was not an easy task. This proved to be a common problem for all Turkic peoples, which led most of them to abandon the Arabic alphabet. The introduction of the Latin alphabet in Turkey simplified the spelling, making it phonetically more accurate, but it also revealed those discrepancies between the Turkic languages that were previously not so noticeable in writing. Now the phonetic features of each language are clearly marked. In Turkey in the XX century, not only the font, alphabet, but also the language itself changed. The language reform that was carried out in the country ... Read more